Moscow, Russia – Two years ago, when the war began, Vladimir Putin was extremely optimistic about his chances of subduing Ukraine. The Russian president expected a rapid collapse or surrender of the neighboring country and planned a series of relatively quick maneuvers, along with air strikes and amphibious operations, to seize important cities, including the capital. The capture of kyiv did not happen and, among the large cities, only Mariupol fell into their hands. Ukraine even regained territories, inflicting some humiliations on the Russians.
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Over the past six months, the war in Ukraine has reached a stalemate, although Russia has now regained the initiative and put Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the defensive.
As the war enters its third year, Russian forces went on the offensive and captured the eastern town of Avdiivka after months of fighting. Russian analysts believe this will keep occupied Donetsk safe from Ukrainian bombing, while Moscow evaluates how to continue its campaign to take the rest of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has just announced that Russia will continue its advance into eastern Ukraine. For Ukrainians, the challenge is to resist with ammunition that comes to them through donations from third parties.
The real cost of war
For the Russians, the question is how long they will be able to maintain the military pulse in a war that is costing them more lives than the other side and a continuous escalation of sanctions on their economy.
Neither side provides data on deaths in the war. The economic figures, on the other hand, are obvious: Russia's war in Ukraine is depleting state coffers, but Moscow still has savings to endure without problems surfacing in public spending in the form of cuts.
Even if oil prices fall to $60 a barrel, Vladimir Putin's regime is counting on what it has accumulated over the past two decades. According to experts, it is enough to last for years.
With around $300 billion of Russian reserves tied up in the West, data suggests that sanctions against Moscow and Russia's military spending are reducing its financial power, but at a slow pace.
Meanwhile, ammunition continues to flow to Russia, despite the blockades. Iran has provided the Kremlin with a large number of powerful surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, the Reuters agency revealed this week.
Moscow is little by little deepening military cooperation between the two countries, which are getting closer and closer, 'twinned' by US sanctions.
![Russian soldiers run through Red Square in central Moscow on September 29, 2022, as the square is sealed ahead of a ceremony incorporating the new territories into Russia.](https://s.france24.com/media/display/c818809a-d20a-11ee-add5-005056bfb2b6/000_32KC9M3.jpg)
The fundamental purpose of Putin's war was always to keep Ukraine within Russia's orbit (politically, culturally and economically), even though it has had the opposite effect. Since 2014, that effort has been made in increasingly less subtle ways.
At the beginning of February 2022, I believed that the chances of war were 30% or 40% because common sense indicated that there would be no war,” explains Mark Galeotti, author of the book 'Putin's Wars'.
The survival of a “colonial power”
What was it that confused you? The expert believes that the Russian president has changed with old age, especially in “its lack of willingness to listen to other points of view, the assumption that there are secret plots against Russia.” These are all “features that were there before, but have now become a caricature.”
Russia's interests in Ukraine go beyond security: “Ukraine is a rich country, they have gas and oil minerals and the Russians want to control all that and also the agricultural industry,” says Pekka Toveri, retired general of the Finnish Army.
Russia is the last colonial power in Europe and many people are not aware of it.
But the political framework of the invasion remains the survival of a colonial power. For Azamat Junisbai, a Kazakh researcher on Russian nationalism and professor at Pitzer College, the Russian attitude benefits from great confusion about the country's past.
“Seeing the former Soviet Union as simply Russia has created a gap in our knowledge. “Russia is the last colonial power in Europe and many people are not aware”he tells France 24.
Vladimir Putin has remained in power by increasing both repression and propaganda, despite the sacrifices imposed by partial military mobilization and Western economic sanctions, and appears confident of prevailing in Ukraine in the long term if US military support for Kiev disappears. , says Alessandro Marrone, head of the Defense program at the AIA Institute of International Studies.
![Image from January 7, 2024, distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, of Russian President Vladimir Putin, accompanied by relatives of Russian soldiers killed during the call "special military operation" in Ukraine.](https://s.france24.com/media/display/58536bfc-d20b-11ee-aeb9-005056bf30b7/000_349M2UH.jpg)
In the background is the aversion in the West to a conflict in the event of an escalation between Russia and NATO.
On this anniversary, Putin can boast that he knows how to survive bad news. His army, powerful and numerous, was launched without a good plan into a war and failed to occupy a much smaller and, in theory, weaker country.
The discontent in the barracks was evident with the mutiny of the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, the now deceased Yevgeny Prigozhin, in June of last year. But he also dodged that blow.
Now the question is who will wear out first.
“I think the big problem could arise if Putin were forced to start a new wave of mobilization,” says Russian writer Andrei Soldatov, who adds:
Putin is obsessed with the idea of control. He needs to control the Army from him.
As long as there are no defeats on the front, even if there is not much more progress, Putin's control over his Army and its population will prove sufficiently effective.
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